Acquisition of SV and VS Order in Hebrew, European Portuguese, Palestinian Arabic, and Spanish

Abstract

In Hebrew, European Portuguese, Palestinian Arabic, and Spanish, both SV and VS orders are possible. However, when children acquire these languages, they do not use the whole array of word orders in their language at the first stage of sentence construction. Interestingly, their word order preference in the early stage of acquisition differs in the different languages: in Hebrew and European Portuguese they use both SV and VS orders with unaccusative verbs, but only SV with unergative and transitive verbs. In Spanish and Palestinian Arabic, children prefer to use VS order with unaccusative, unergative, and transitive verbs in the first stage. We present 11 experiments and 5 spontaneous speech analyses in the four languages, eliciting these word order patterns in 257 different children, and analyzing the patterns in spontaneous speech in 80 more children. Based on these results we propose an account for these cross-linguistic differences and similarities, according to which children at this stage can already move the verb to I, but cannot move the subject outside of the VP yet. As a result, at this stage the subjects stay within the VP. Whether or not the verb moves to I depends on whether the linear order of SV within the VP can be violated—languages in which children assume IP as the Spell-out domain, Spanish and Palestinian Arabic, allow the verb to appear before the subject, whereas Hebrew and European Portuguese, in which the Spell-out domain is initially taken to be VP, do not allow the verb to move to I until the Spell-out domain widens.